Monthly Archives: August 2013

Wow. This really happens.

The news from Forest Grove, Oregon, a leafy burb just a stoner’s throw from Portland, is grim:

AUGUST 16 (as paraphrased in OregonLive.com): “A resident on Lavina Drive called police asking for assistance after finding a baseball-sized spider on her couch. An officer arrived at the home and after a brief and heated battle with the large spider, defeated it using an unconventional police weapon, a rolled up newspaper.”

Oregonian correspondent Kari Bray offers further details:

On Friday, Aug. 16, Forest Grove Police Officer Mike Smith responded to a call on Lavina Drive of a lurking couch spider the teenage caller said “looked like a tarantula,” according to Forest Grove police spokesman Capt. Mike Herb.

Smith estimated the spider was about 2 inches in diameter and couldn’t be certain what kind it was, Herb said. He defeated the arachnid with a rolled up newspaper.

The girl told police her mother had recently been bitten, so Smith scooped the dead spider into a container in case the family would like to have it looked at by an expert.

“Police would not normally respond to a call of a spider,” Herb said in an email. “But under the circumstances described we responded to help this girl who was extremely grateful.”

Honestly. Two inches in diameter, and it’s “baseball-sized”? Mom got nipped by an Invisible Spider (right: every mystery boil can be blamed on it) so this one has to die? And you already know the next part. There’s zero chance of the evil couch spider being harmful in any way. Oregon’s only medically significant spider is the black widow, and this wasn’t one.

Send some of those Forest Grove cops to San Jose, won’t you? They obviously have too many. We’ve got budget cuts that keep police from rolling to things like burglaries. We could put some of those newspaper-wielding heroes to work doing real cop stuff.

Allie is a wonderful cartoonist and writer (http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com) but she’s wrong to be scared about spiders. If squishing is so cathartic, why not try, I don’t know, termites? You can have mine.

Let’s go on a spider safari

This one goes out to all you screamers who won’t pick up a spider in a paper cup and put it outside. In case it, you know, leaps for your throat or lays eggs in your hairdo or something else that happens all the time.

In South Africa, a road-widening project ground to a halt last year when workers found a bunch of baboon spider burrows in the way. The two species encountered, Augacephalus junodi and Ceratogyrus darlingi, are protected, so the spiders had to be relocated.

Helloooo, Blondie. Augacephalus junodi, the golden baboon spider, had to pick up stakes when the road came through.

Augacephalus is one of the most beautiful species names ever. Auga refers to the rays of the sun and cephalus means head; the pattern on this spider’s cephalothorax looks like a big, golden sunburst. Ceratogyrus has a little horn.

Baboon spiders are tarantulas. Hairy, hefty. They even sound big, though by tarantula standards they’re not especially. Tarantula hobbyists like to show them off, which means the populations are at risk from the illegal pet trade.

So did the road workers all faint in unison at the prospect of herding tarantulas?

Of course not: South Africans, folks! they’re tough. They wrestle lions before breakfast. Instead the workers, advised by a team of scientists, rounded up the big spiders by rooting them out of their burrows and collecting them by hand. Out of 400 spiders relocated (cue “Kingdom of the Spiders” footage, hello Bill Shatner), only two of them bit anybody, and the game-reserve adviser on the project shrugged it off with, “It is like a bee sting.”

A scientist (you can tell, only scientists wear wristwatches anymore) shows one of the relocated baboon spiders around her new digs. New burrow holes were dug with an auger, with grass and such added for curb appeal.

I love this place! Then the team dug hundreds of artificial burrows for this shy, retiring animal, which lives most of its life in the same hole in the ground. The refugee spiders accepted the carefully located new burrows, which featured moistened soil and a scattering of plant material outside for shelter. The project turned out so well that other construction projects in South Africa started sending their spiders to the new habitat, too. Adjust your safari plans accordingly.

A side note: I’m sure you’ve noticed how eager energy companies are to trumpet their environmental credentials. These spider wranglers worked for a South African mining concern called Exxaro, which was widening a road to a power plant. I know nothing of their record and of course this story makes them look good—especially the part where some of the spiders set up housekeeping in a pile of ash next to another coal-fired power plant. Still, if oil companies can pass themselves off as cormorant-hugging do-gooders, I suppose this mining concern can use tarantulas as spokes-spiders for sustainability. After all, they coulda just squished them.